Banishing the Sticky Note

A few weeks ago I was talking with a long-time girlfriend of mine, DeeDee, and she made a statement that has had me deep in thought ever since she said it…

“The first day we met you told me you were going to do two things: adopt a baby girl and write a book. You did both, and I’m proud of you.”

For many years, I have been talking about goal setting and following your heart. I have posted demonstrations on how to make a goal board and where to hang it – heck, even how often to update it. I have been that girl, that friend and that mom. The goal preacher.

For as long as I can remember I have made lists. Lists of what I wanted to accomplish; in any given month, on any given day and for almost every area of my life. But, I made these lists for most of my life in a journal or on random sticky notes. It wasn’t until I began my fitness journey two + years ago that I began creating goal boards. Initially, they were about how many inches I wanted to loose in fat or gain in muscle or how many push-ups or miles ran I wanted to get to. Somewhere along the way, I am going to guess it was about a year or so ago, I began writing my big life goals on the boards that I had publically displayed in my home. Even then, and even now I don’t have my deepest goals written there. That is why the statement that DeeDee made to me hit me so hard. I wrote down the goals I knew I could hit. I knew if I increased the amount of push-ups that I did each day, I would make my goal. If I stuck with my nutrition plan, I would be able to hit my inches goal. I finally put “publish book one” on my goal board after I was almost done writing book one. I have been cheating myself. I have been a hypocrite, and now I am going to come clean and hold myself accountable.

The conversation DeeDee reminded me of took place in 1998. I didn’t have a goal board hung in my home back then. I never had “adopt a baby” or “write a book” written down anywhere. To me, back then – those were things I wanted to do but they were not things I actually believed that I could do. They were dreams. They were dreams because I never wrote them down, laid out a plan and made them goals. Perhaps if I had done so I would have hit those goals earlier in life. Perhaps if I had written my dreams down they would have felt obtainable. I might have started trying to accomplish those things back in 1998. I didn’t.

In 2006, I brought a beautiful baby girl home. My daughter is almost nine years old now. The process to make her my daughter was long and extremely difficult. I never wrote down what I wanted to do. I just did it and all along the way I made those lists. A list for what paperwork I needed. A list for how the financing was going to happen – how much money the business had to bring in to make it happen at each step of the way. I made lists before each visit to her country – what clothes, baby items and presents for the orphanage staff I needed to pack. A sticky note to remind myself to bring my passport, traveler’s checks, sunglasses – you get the drift. But I never wrote down the goal of being a mom again or the goal of having a daughter. I wish I had. If the adoption process felt more like a goal becoming real, I am certain that I would have enjoyed it more. I may have taken more than five minutes here and there to stop and reflect on how huge it was that it was truly happening. It would have been nice to come home from that final trip and place a big red X over that goal box. Be the mom of a baby girl – check.

Similarly, I never once wrote down that I was going to publish a novel before I was in the process. I wrote down all the things I needed to do to make it happen. I spent a lot of time doing research and drafted about eight hundred sticky notes along the way, but it wasn’t until I knew it was happening that I wrote it up there on my board.

So, for the past few weeks I have been examining what my goals are now. My big goals – the ones that don’t feel real. I know what they are. I know exactly what they are, but the bullshit story I tell myself is that it probably won’t happen. Have a plan B. I don’t allow myself to get too attached to my dreams. Therefore, they remain dreams. I can’t honestly say they are goals. That doesn’t mean that I don’t truly want those things to happen. It just means that I don’t believe that my dreams are realistic. Out of fear of failure, I let those wants that I have deep in my heart stay there. The funny thing is when I stopped for a minute and thought about it, I know what I am doing and why. I understand the psychology behind my lack of willingness to put it all out there. I’ve been acting like a big wimp. I’ve been doing what I tell others not to do.

My goal for this week is to make a new goal board to include all the goals I have. The real ones. The big ones. The scary ones. The hard ones. Not only am I going to write them down and post them on the wall of my office, I am going to believe that they are possible – because they are. ANYTHING is possible. I am also going to call DeeDee and thank her for leading me to the space I needed to be in – the space of growing fearlessly toward my goals.

I am going to quit using sticky notes unless I need a reminder of what to pick up at the grocery store.

What are your dreams? Make them your goals!

 

-RJ